


Star-Crossed Serendipity

by BeneathSilverStars



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (it isn't working), (my OTP is terrible), (that isn't working either), Canon Compliant, I wrote this to convince myself that it was terrible and I shouldn't ship it, Karkat is squinting hard with you, M/M, Overall I think it's ambiguous enough to fit the ambiguity of canon, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, but mostly just terrible unhappy Gamkat, idk maybe I got some details wrong but I'm pretty sure it's pretty much canon compliant, mentions of Gamrezi and all the other meteor people, so you can squint hard and pretend it's tragic instead of terrible, terrible Gamkat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-04 14:37:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeneathSilverStars/pseuds/BeneathSilverStars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamzee is there too, waiting for you.</p>
<p>You knew he would be. He always is.</p>
<p>But you’re still a little bit surprised.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Wherein three trolls and two humans are stuck hurtling through the void on a far too empty meteor; wherein a self-proclaimed expert in leadership and relationships finds himself lacking the resources and the will for either; wherein silence is cold and loneliness is unforgiving and serendipity is not all it's cracked up to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You’re always a little bit surprised when you see him there, waiting for you.

There’s no reason to be. There’s nowhere else for him to go, not really, nothing else for him to do, no one else for him to interact with, nothing to prevent him from being there. He has never given you any reason to doubt him. If anything, you’re the one who isn’t dependable; sometimes you can’t come up with a good excuse to abandon Rose in the middle of a book discussion, sometimes Kanaya just has to show you her latest design, sometimes Dave decides to hassle you just as you are slipping out of the room. Your moirail has no such social obligations. He’s always there waiting at the appointed time, ready and welcoming and familiar and yet-

You’re always just a little bit surprised.

***

You hurry down the abandoned hallway, low ambient lighting giving your features a dull, gloomy edge. You look over your shoulder often, wary and self-conscious as ever. You know that no one is on your trail. Kanaya has long ago given up her clown hunting, Terezi has no real reason to care, and the humans seem to hardly even remember that there is a fourth troll on the meteor. No one has any reason to follow you, and even if they did, you would have lost them ten transportalizers, twenty random corridors, and two claustrophobic passages ago.

You look over your shoulder anyway.

***

You are jumpy with adrenaline and nervousness. You had thought you had heard something, someone, just beside you, just beyond you, just behind you, catching up-

The empty lab echoes oddly and makes strange noises without a cause.

You are loathe to admit how much each sudden interruption startles you, makes your hand reach toward your sickles and your stomach clench in dreadful, fearful anticipation-

It doesn’t matter. Each sound turns out to be causeless, each movement simply your imagination, dark shadowy daymares of times long past.

***

You finally arrive.

You slip the grate from its spot with practiced ease, ducking into the ventilation shaft and pulling the covering back into place behind you. You know that it must be cramped for a troll as large as your moirail, but you’re small, and once you make it past the initial opening, you barely have to duck. It isn’t far anyway, a couple steps and a turn and a few steps more and pop open another grate and you’re there.

Gamzee is there too, waiting for you.

You knew he would be. He always is.

But you’re still a little bit surprised.


	2. Chapter 2

The room is small, but you like it that way. The meteor has too many big open spaces: cavernous labs, leagues of unused corridors, rooms full to bursting with unsaid words and old memories that only serve to empty the places they occupy further, all leading to the infinite, hopeless expanse of paradox space. So you chose a room that is small. It fills with the warm sounds of breath and heart beat instead of the cold echoes of machinery, and even when the silence is exactly the same, it is somehow more bearable here.

This place isn’t half the size of your respite block back on Alternia; you think it might have been a closet of some kind. Whatever use it previously had, it is now solidly devoted to a large pile made predominantly of horns, with the occasional romcom or poster scattered throughout. You kind of wish you had chosen a moirail whose signature item was a bit less noisy, but you have Gamzee and he just wouldn’t be himself without his stupid, obnoxious, pan-rattlingly startling horns.

You’ll get used to them.

You have all the time in the world to get used to them.

***

You’re currently curled up on the pile, and Gamzee is carelessly stretched out beside you. His clothes are getting too small - he’s been growing like crazy, as if he wasn’t tall enough before - and his t-shirt has shifted to reveal ribs that stick out in unhealthy ways, like those of a troll who's forgotten for the last peregee that hey, food is important, and has been eating improperly for sweeps and sweeps before that, and probably wouldn’t know a decent meal if it walked up with a name tag and a dozen introductions and a neon sign pointing straight at it and a personal choir singing its praises and recommendations from a friend and several business references and this metaphor is getting away from you what was that sentence about?

Oh right, Gamzee’s glaringly obvious malnutrition. You used to bring him food but he always refused it, saying he knew perfectly fine how to use the alchemizer and raid the pantries. You used to argue, but he would always talk circles around you and change the subject, and it was so hard to fight with a hand on your face and another on your horns and a voice shoosh shooshing at you like you were going to murder a seadweller, not just try to convince your moirail to shut up and stop molesting you and eat the food you brought him instead.

He needs more than just his stupid wicked elixir and miracle sparkle dust or whatever it is he has out there.

You wonder if you should try to say something to him about it again.

You don’t.


	3. Chapter 3

He whispers into your hair, breath tickling the base of a horn. His voice is too low, too quiet for you to make out the words.

You wish you were sure you wanted to hear them.

He just makes it so hard sometimes! Moirallegiance is about trust, and you do trust him, you really really do. You do! It’s just. He never tells you anything. He invites your questions and neatly dodges each one, and he encourages you to follow his tracks and then thoroughly erases them, and he promises to help and ignores every plea or suggestion.

And he murmurs his secrets, in a tone just beyond your hearing.

***

You beg him to tell you something, anything, you plead with him to speak up-

He silences you with cool fingers on your mouth, a strong hand on your jaw, a gentle, heartbreaking, shoosh shoosh shooosh.

He stops whispering after that.

***

You trust him. You do. You know it’s stupid, you know it doesn’t make sense, to trust this insane murder clown, this pan-rotted addict, this lonely orphan, this piece of serendipity. Maybe you’re pan-rotted too, cause yeah, you trust him.

You try not to think about whether or not he trusts you.

***

This is ok though, right? Sometimes moirallegiance transcends words. Sometimes a pair of moirails are pale for each other at first sight, sometimes everything works out with the first pap. They love each other so completely, they don’t even need to talk! One look and they calm. One touch and they melt. One night together and all of their problems are fixed, through the sheer healing power of moirallegiance. They don’t need mere words, don’t need to sully their pure love and commitment with talk.

You ignore the part of yourself that’s laughing scornfully.


	4. Chapter 4

You wake up and he's gone.

You hadn’t noticed falling asleep, but you know you must have, because your back is cricked, your neck cramped, your limbs heavy, and your pan achingly clear: all usual results of a day spent sleeping soporless. You’re missing the biggest symptoms, though, the racing heartbeat and panicked breathing that come hand in hand with daymares. Waking up calm is an odd experience; even with a perfect night’s rest in a recouperacoon, you’ve never quite been able to fend off the daymares completely. In fact, the limited and expiring sopor on board the meteor during the game had almost made the dreams worse, softening your reflexes and dulling your mind and hardly taking the edge off of the terrors in return at all. You could only sit by, sluggish and stupid, as you watched your friends die over and over, in new terrible ways and old familiar ones, losing and suffering and crying out for help...

Yeah, the sopor hadn't really helped.

Gamzee, though.

You never have daymares when Gamzee’s around.

***

As you make your way back to the populated sections of the meteor, you try to feel angry at him for leaving, or at least annoyed at the time wasted in sleep, but you can’t. Despite your renewed physical energy, all you feel is tired. It’s hard to stay mad at someone for not doing something you never expected – or even asked – them to do, and when has Gamzee ever stayed? As for the self-imposed no-sleeping rule, well. You used to be able to blame yourself for anything and everything, you used to annoy yourself with every little thing you did, but these days even that seems useless. If anyone is worth the effort, it’s definitely not you.

Anyway, it’s not like it even matters how you spend your time anymore. Your game is over. The only things left are an empty meteor and an empty three years and too many empty computer terminals. No one needs you to lead them, not anymore. If they ever did in the first place.

***

You're about to wander into the computer room, but you catch sight of Terezi and Dave, and as you watch they start laughing at something on the screen in front of them. You turn back to the hallway. Dave's stifled huffs of laughter quickly become inaudible, but Terezi's screeching cackles follow you for a while, echoing loud and distorted.

The transportalizer to your room cuts off all sounds of habitation. Even the machinery has fallen quiet for a time.

The silence is cold and unforgiving.

Your husktop is on the other side of the room, and you consider retrieving it. You could watch a movie, let Troll Will Smith's voice chase away the sound of emptiness with talk of serendipity. Or you could stay here, you guess, where you've apparently already slumped down, leaning on the wall beside your door.

This isn't how it was supposed to happen. None of it, really, but this especially, this meteor with these people, this small leftover handful of people. All of your friends have abandoned you, by choice or not. So many gone forever, and the ones who aren't, well. Kanaya has her hands full with Rose, and you haven't had a conversation with Terezi in what feels like perigees. Your old flush crush only ever hangs out with Dave and the Mayor anymore, and even though you maybe knew that it was too late, that you had messed it all up like you always do, it still hurts. Whenever you do try to talk to her, she cuts you off quickly. She makes excuses and scurries off, with a look of almost guilt on her face. She shouldn't feel guilty though, for not wanting to talk to someone like you, a stupid wiggler with his head too far up his waste chute to appreciate a good thing when he has it. Could have had it.

You wish you had someone you could talk to about her.

You wish you had someone you could talk to.

***

There's no reason to burden Gamzee with your troubles, not when he has so many of his own.

You're a good moirail, of course, so you always put your palemate first. Never mind the fact that he doesn't seem to be returning the favor; as previously stated, he has enough problems of his own. Never mind the fact that he doesn't seem to appreciate your efforts; he's just independent, he can take care of himself. It's not like he's rampaging anymore. No more paps needed. No new death on his hands. After he got over his religious crisis or whatever, he's been pretty stable. No thanks to you.

He can deal with himself. And as for you?

You don't really deserve to have someone help you with the curses you brought upon yourself.


	5. Chapter 5

Days pass. Kanaya sews another useless new dress, Rose manages to stumble onto the wrong transportalizer in her human soporific-induced stupor and get lost, Terezi and Dave get in a fight, and then it's time once again.

When you finally manage to shake a surprisingly clingy, obviously distressed, and unsuccessfully aloof Dave off of you, it's past the time you should have left. He's ironically mumbling to himself about totally hypothetical quadrant issues as you exit the room.

You eventually make it to the second-to-last grate, later than you'd like to be but not near as late as you've been sometimes in the past. A couple steps and a turn and a few steps more and pop open another grate and you’re there.

Gamzee isn't.

Despite yourself, you aren't surprised.

***

You creep onto the pile anyway and the clown horns are so much louder than normal, and when you're settled, the room is so much quieter than normal. You stare blankly at the wall.

You don't think he's going to show. You wait anyway.

You leave when you can't stand the icy silence any longer.

***

You take a new, unpredictable route as you leave, same as you always have. In fact, you make a detour through a cavernous lab you've never entered before. If past experience is right, and in this orderly maze of repeating rooms it usually is, you should meet up with a parallel corridor on the other side, and it should take you to the intersection you need.

You're half way through before you notice the blood on the walls.

Olive. Cerulean. Tyrian, violet, indigo, teal bronze purple-

Teal.

You walk closer.

The teal blood is smeared in the shape of a spade.

You remember guilty looks through red glasses at the sight of you. You remember your recent one-sided conversation with Dave. You remember the smell of faygo on a dragon cape. You remember mysterious injuries you never dared question. You remember a lot of things that you were trying not to connect.

Turns out Gamzee has social obligations after all.

You just wish that someone had told you.


	6. Chapter 6

You go back to your room, slowly, along the most direct path. When you get there you draw in a deep breath, excepting to scream, expecting to rage, excepting to cry.

You sigh instead.

You are so, so tired. You realize that you have been unconsciously trying not to sleep on your own, holding out for the peaceful dreamless slumber you always found next to your moirail, so you trudge to your recouperacoon, which is full of random junk. The sopor is long gone, and every attempt at alchemizing a replacement has gone rather horribly. So, pile in a 'coup it is. Daymare after daymare it is.

You think that maybe you could give a try to that human soporific of Rose's.

***

Gamzee is there again next time. He offers no explanation for his absence, and you ask him no questions. In fact, neither of you speak at all.

You leave feeling worse than ever.

***

You go back to your room and this time, this time you cry, silently,  into a dark pillow that will hide the stains left by too-bright tears.

You were going to try. You were. You had it all planned out, you were going to confront Gamzee, you were going to give him one last chance to tell you about his kismesissitude with Terezi himself. He was going to break down and tell you everything he never had before, he was going to hug you, for real, so tight and close, loud and warm, he was going to trust you with his secrets, and they were going to turn out to be not so bad after all, scary but okay, things you could fix. And you were going to fix them. You were going to have an actual conversation with him for the first time, you were going to really talk, you were going to fix him.

You didn't.

***

You don't next time either, and eventually you stop planning to.

***

Perigees later, when he finally breaks up with you, you aren't surprised.

Not even a little bit.


End file.
